According to Sikh teaching the pinnacle of all spirituality is meditation on the Naam. However, exactly what meditation on the Naam is is unclear because it is never clearly defined in any of the traditional Sikh writings. This has led to many arguments and deep divisions among various Sikh associatons. American Sikhs, students of Yogi Bhajan, have often assumed that meditation on the Naam means repetition of the mantra Waheguru, which is the most sacred Sikh name of God. There is a basic flaw to this thinking. Repetition of a mantra, any mantra even the most sacred ever conceived, is not meditation, and therefore Meditation on the Naam does not refer to repetition of any name of God. The repetition of a mantra, any mantra, is a spiritual practice.

In order to understand this it is necessary to define and explain a few basic terms.

What is spirituality? Kundalini Yoga teaches that we and all creation exist in Oneness with God. If spirituality means connection to God then all living things are equally spiritual because all things are equally part of the Oneness of God. This would mean that spirituality has no real distinction. What makes spirituality distinct is the ability to recognize the connection of Oneness. Humanity has this ability which other species appear to lack. The basis for this ability of humanity to recognize our connection with Oneness lies in our ability to recognize what is true. As humans we can recognize when we are being honest with ourselves and when we are not and make choices accordingly. We also have the ability to hear what we want to hear and believe what we want to believe. We have these opposing abilities in equal amounts. This is the basis of our free will. We have the ability to choose to develop more honesty within ourselves or to choose ignorance and maintain our delusions. Anything that we do that causes us to become more honest with ourselves is spiritual. Anything that encourages us to hear only what we want to hear and believe what we want to believe inhibits our spirituality.

A spiritual practice then is anything that we do that develops our ability to be honest with ourselves. Kundalini Yoga is the science that includes all forms of spiritual practice. Kundalini Yoga makes no differentiation for religion or belief system. If the intent of the practice is to cause the practitioner to become more honest with themselves it is a valid spiritual practice and part of Kundalini Yoga. Kundalini Yoga is not just the exercises and kriyas that are associated with yogic masters like Yogi Bhajan. Kundalin Yoga includes all types of prayer, all chanting and singing of hymns, all bowing or genuflction before what is deemed sacred, all contemplation of any divine form, all performance of devotional service, and all recitation of divine mantras. If it is a practice that causes folks to become more honest with themselves it is part of Kundalini Yoga.

Meditation is the ability to process ourselves to discover what is true. It has two parts, expanding awareness and applying consciousness. We all learn through expanding our awareness and applying our consciousness. It is the only way we ever learn. When we learned to walk or talk we had to expand our awareness to incorporate parts of ourselves that we had never used before and we had to make decisions about what worked and didn’t work by applying our consciousness. The expansion of awareness and application of consciousness is so essential to learning that it is even key to the evolution of all lifeforms. In other words, evolution itself is based upon the development of the skills necessary to meditate. What makes humanity unique is that we can directly access the expansion of our awareness and the application of our consciousness while other species have not adequately developed them to do so.

When we have learned meditation to the point that we can expand our awareness and apply our consciousness at any moment on command this is still not meditation on the Naam. Meditation on the Naam means that we we have expanded our awareness and applied our consciousness to the point that we have come to the experience of our essence, the Oneness. It is called the experience of the Soul. When one can meditate and produce the experience of the Soul this is meditation on the Naam.

It is the purpose of all spiritual practices to cause us to become more honest with ourselves so that we can directly access the ultimate honesty within ourselves which is the experience of our own Soul which exists in Oneness with all creation and God.

Over the weekend I was involved in several diverse and lengthy discussions about the needed shift from religious to spiritual (Shifting trom Religious to Spiritual). During these discussions there were two themes that had general agreement. The first was that this shift is imperative because the lack of this shift is producing severe threats that are imminent to humanity and even the environment of life on our planet. The second was that making the necessary shift is very difficult to do and is happening much too slowly to address the dire problems that we face. Everybody in these discussions agreed on these main issues. I am happy to establish why these points are true and to deal with disagreement to them in the comments section. This post will address the question of how to effect this change more quickly.

Change comes from within. When change is attempted only externally it does not work. This is why dealing with global climate change is so difficult to deal with. It requires us to each change how we relate to ourselves and the way we each live our lives. It requires us each to change to become more ethical in our own lives when it is easier not to do the right thing. This requires internal change. When this problem is approached with from an external solution point of view it is not even clear what to do to solve the problem. There are some general ideas, maybe even some general agreement on a good day, but no clear path out of the mess. This paradigm can be applied to any of the imminent problems facing humanity. This is because the solutions that are proposed for these problems attempt to impose change from outside on the problem, rather than approaching the issue as needing deeper spiritual responsibility and development from within. These exterior solutions have the effect of medicating the symptoms of the problems but never getting to or dealing with the root of the problem.

The war in Afghanistan is a prime example of how solutions that are imposed from outside do not fix the problems within. There are huge problems with the way that the folks within Afghanistan have in dealing with each other involving everything from violence to corruption. Until those issues are dealt with by them, no solution that is applied from an exterior source will work. Where they are not taking responsibility for their own problems no outside aid or force will work. David Rohde is very articulate on this topic also (Spiritual Conflict Resolution).

How to develop the spiritual growth needed in these cases is the realm of expertise of Spiritual Teachers. Spiritual Teachers are those rare individuals among us that have learned to address their own internal corruption and manipulative behaviors and understand that serving this spiritual growth in others is the path of their lives. In this day and age Spiritual Teachers tend to be objects of suspicion and mistrust. This is because no distinction is made between them and religious leaders and they are therefore considered to be as corrupt as their religious counterparts. The big distinction betwen the two is that the job of a Spiritual Teacher is to take the student to the point of spiritual independence while the religious leader is continually tries to increase their own authority and that of their religion. While Spiritual Teachers can be affiliated with a religion, they recognize that religion is just a vehicle to present spirituality. The Spiritual Teacher’s responsibility is to the development of spiritual understanding and not to the religious participation of the students.

Another misconception is that Spiritual Teachers are considered to have lived long ago and are not thought to be around today. Religions revere Spiritual Teachers like Moses, Buddha, Yeshua (Jesus), the Prophet Mohammad, and the Sikh Gurus religiously and mostly ignore the presence of Spiritual Teachers in our own time. To confuse things even worse, posers promote themselves as Spiritual Teachers which makes it seems as if true Spiritual Teachers are the same as these posers. They are not.

What makes Spiritual Teachers so vital for us at this time is that they alone have the understanding of the spiritual changes that we each need to go through individually, and teaching others who are then capable of teaching others is the only feasible way to multiply the numbers needed to have sufficient impact on our most serious problems.

In order to help validate that real Spiritual Teachers are with us today there is a page on this blog entitled “How I Met My Teacher” that contains real life experiences of people meeting Spiritual Teachers. This page is for everyone to post in the comment box their own story of how they recognized their Teacher as a Spiritual Master. It is also OK to challenge the validity of these experiences and the Spiritual Teachers associated with them in the spirit of investigating and actually defining what a Spiritual Teacher really is and is not.

Spiritual Teachers that I have personally identified in this lifetime are:

This is a very intense subject and requires a word of caution. We all have feelings that we have blocked ourselves from being aware of. In order to become more complete these blocked feelings need to become unblocked and the fear, guilt and shame that we associate with those feelings must be redeemed through forgiveness. This is not a light subject, and those that feel terrified at the thought of unleashing pent up emotions please consider waiting until you are ready to proceed. In addition, anyone taking medication for depression MUST continue to take their medication until that requirement is changed by their doctor.

In the intro of his book The Power of Now (pp. 1-2) Eckhart Tolle describes the intensity that he went through as he learned to unlock what he had blocked. It is highly recommended that this be read in order to understand the level of intensity that we are dealing with and also to be familiar with what someone else did that was healing when they found they could no longer block their most intense feelings.

I read a post yesterday of a piece of prose entitled Cafe News, Volume 2. In its seven brief paragraphs it describes the Hell that we create and maintain for our lives. The piece’s honesty describes internal thoughts and emotions that we all have and have learned to avoid. In fact we have become expert at avoiding them because the survival of our psyche has depended on it. This survival has become our persona, and this piece of prose accurately conveys how we do this to ourselves.

Cafe News, Volume 2: Actually, I don’t even know anymore, what’s true and what’s not. I don’t even know if I care. Mostly, I just sit around, wishing for some life other than the one I have. Wishing something external would change me into what I want to be.

We are sensory beings. We see, we hear, we touch, we feel. We have a sense of everything that is so complex that we cannot fully understand anything. There is always a deeper understanding. We are connected to and part of infinity. We experience infinity as always more complexity because each experience is a part of our experience of the infinite interconnectedness of the Universe. Every experience also contains uniqueness that gives every moment in every life unpredictability. While it is predictable that the Sun will rise in the morning, the exact experience of tomorrow morning is always beyond anyone’s ability to predict. These qualities that every experience is infinite and beyond our ability to ever fully comprehend it and at the same time unique can be referred to as infinite-creativity/God. We are always in this experience of infinite-creativity/God to the point that we cannot even conceive of ever having the same two exact experiences or meeting the same two people.

This continuous experience of infinite-creativity maintains constant uncertainty, and uncertainty causes us to question ourselves and our connection to everything (Actually, I don’t even know anymore, what’s true and what’s not.). Whatever else life may be it is always an experience of constant uncertainty, and as former two year-olds we have all developed behavior patterns to in some way to control the uncomfortable feelings of our constant uncertainty. When we try to hold onto our control instead of humbling ourselves to expand our concepts it causes us the pain of the Cafe News quote above. We are clinging to a delusional sense of control. At the same time we are aware that this is not working and is in fact causing us unhappiness, yet we resist that awareness because we do not know how to act other than our control pattern so that clinging to our fantasy of control only causes the intensity of the uncertainty to increase. In this way we maintain our ignorance. We ignore that our delusions of control do not work and are the source of our suffering.

If all life is, is a continuum of the unique experience of uncertainty in each moment, there would be no redemption and no such thing as spirituality. This is not the case because within our suffering there is always a delusion that we are holding onto. When we surrender our control of this delusion we are able to consider possibilities beyond those of our delusion, and when we relax our attitude in this way something beyond the outcomes that our delusion of control predicts manifests. (There is always this cause and effect relationship. This is one of the proofs that spirituality exists.) The tension of our uncertainty is therefore constantly teaching us how to recognize our control issues, and experience a reality beyond our delusions. This is the path of our redemption. It doesn’t matter what religion we belong to we must all redeem our delusions.

Notice that in Cafe News, Volume 2 the dissatisfaction that is felt indicates what is causing the suffering. Mostly, I just sit around, wishing for some life other than the one I have. Wishing something external would change me into what I want to be. . . . I always told myself I was a cut above the rest. Unfortunately, this is true. I am clearly capable of achieving absolutely exceptional examples of self-deception. We know when we are deceiving ourselves we even know how we are doing it. We always feel it. We try to avoid our feelings of self-deception but this only causes our suffering to intensify because it is only more self-deception, and we know it. Even our attempts at self-honesty are deceptive: Basically, I’ve come to realize I’m full of shit. Rather than using this honesty to redeem ourselves we find a way to diminish it and sustain what we are ignoring: Not that it matters, because everyone is.

We feel all of this because we have awareness of all of this. We have feelings of how we are maintaining our state of self-deception in every moment. This awareness of our self-deception is something that we are always aware of even in our dreams at night as Cafe News describes so eloquently. Correspondingly, we always know when we are being honest with ourselves. Always. Just as our self-deception happens incrementally, builds on itself, and becomes habitual, self-honesty can grow from the seemingly insignificant honesty of identifying what we feel (How we deepen what we know is true). In this state of honesty we can then also identify what our reaction to what we are feeling is, what our preconception is about that feeling, and then evaluate the validity of our reactions and preconceptions. This is all included in what Eckhart Tolle relates [The Power of Now (pp. 1-2)].

Ultimately it is important for us to develop our self-honesty in order to understand what it was that sparked us to develop our patterns of self-deception in the first place. This is necessary in order to completely redeem ourselves and establish a new behavior pattern. I will relate a personal experience of this in the next post (Self-deception and Redemption, a True Story).

At the end of the Fresh Air interview Terry Gross asked Rohde about how to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan:

‘GROSS: My impression is that you don’t like to give opinions about policy. You want to report of not being an opinion person. But I am wondering how this experience changed your sense of what’s going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and what the U.S. might do – I mean, and what the U.S. can do and what maybe it can’t do.

Mr. ROHDE: I think the vital thing remains to empower moderate Afghans and Pakistanis to confront this threat. I mean, Americans can’t solve these problems. We also can’t just sort of walk away from the region. One of the main things that shouldn’t happen, I think – I mean, is to -you know, the United States and moderate Muslims cannot sort of cede Islam to the Taliban. I mean, the Islam they practiced that I saw, you know, is a just completely distorted version of the religion. And they shouldn’t be allowed to sort of portray themselves as the true defenders of that faith.

I mean, constant statements and reactions I had from Afghan and Pakistani friends was we’re so sorry you were kidnapped. You know, kidnapping civilians, you know, and sending suicide bombers into mosques, you know, that is not jihad. That is not Islam. And so it’s vital to sort of, you know, for the United States to remain committed in the region, but to let, you know, Afghans and Pakistanis to take the lead in confronting this problem politically and militarily and in other ways. And another big take away was the sense that corruption is just a cancer on particularly the Afghan government, but also the Pakistani government.

The Taliban sort of promise rule of law and a lack of corruption among local police and officials, and that’s, in a sense, why they’re popular in some areas. I think average Afghans just want for stability and an effective government, and whoever produces that, in the sense, will win their loyalties. And again, I – there is a base. A vast majority of Afghans and Pakistanis are moderates. It’s not too late to stabilize both countries, but it is going to take time. And I – you know, I think a tremendous amount of training and support to the Afghans, who – and Pakistanis who so desperately oppose the Taliban, as well.’

This is a very valid and important concept that demonstrates the spiritual approach to conflict resolution.

I was once conducting interviews and collecting footage for a documentary (that I never finished) to compare religious and spiritual concepts and perceptions. Actually that is not really honest. What I was really trying to do with the documentary was to expose how beliefs are too rigid and inflexible to be wide enough and open enough to include the spirituality of the interconnected Universe. At this time I attended a press conference that the Dalai Lama gave. (blogs about the Dalai Lama: Nonduality blog, Burma Review, Culture Broker’s Musings, A critique of Vipassana Meditation as taught by Mr S N Goenka, Violence and Fearlessness, Losing my religion, China censors beyond its borders) Rather than speaking about any political agenda that he might have, the Dalai Lama took it as an opportunity to speak to the press about the way that news is presented and broadcast in our time. He tried to teach the assembled press how to cover the news more spiritually. He said it was understandable that when some shocking event takes place that the press needs to report it but they also need to report the motivation for the shocking behavior so that there can be understanding. He said that it was this understanding is what is needed to develop the correct response to the shocking behavior. Since it is the motivation that causes the shocking behavior, that behavior cannot be controlled until what motivated it has been addressed. He pointed out that there is a lack of media coverage of the motivation behind shocking behavior, and this deprived the general public from developing needed understanding. He also made it quite clear that profit driven news cycles that only go from one shocking event to the next without ever reporting on motivation created a public appetite for this kind of stimulation that actually prevents the understanding necessary to actually resolve conflict from ever developing. The Dalai Lama gave that press conference in the early 90’s, before suicide bombers and 9/11.

When what motivates a conflict is not understood the conflict cannot be resolved. Conflicts that are not resolved worsen until the issues behind the conflict are dealt with.

When the motivations of the support of the Taliban that David Rohde articulates are examined, it is clear that some of these motivations are based on misconceptions and a lack of understanding. The obvious question is how can the misunderstanding be addressed. Mr. Rohde gives at least part of that answer in his response to Terri Gross. He points out that much of the misunderstanding that exists within the forces that support the Taliban is based on religious misinterpretations of the spiritual teaching of Islam. Although he does not make the point in this interview Mr. Rohde alludes to the fact that because folks that hold extreme religious points of view interpret everything in terms of their own religious framework it is not possible for those outside those religious beliefs to address them. A religious extremist that is Christian interprets information in the context of their Christian beliefs. A Muslim religious extremist does the same thing. When we interpret information only in our religious terms it becomes easier to marginalize those that do not share our religious views.

This is the reason that religious extremists do not listen to those who are outside their religions. Religious extremism puts everything into religious context and anyone that does not understand that context and is unable to speak in that understanding is marginalized as not important enough for their opinion to matter. A Christian that believes that abortion is murder and therefore condones the murder of doctors that perform abortions has a religious framework of thought that is used to justify the murder of these doctors. In order to alter this justification it is necessary to communicate in the terms of the framework of the Christian belief. Only people that practice the same religion can speak to spiritual misinterpretations within a religion. Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu can speak to a lack of Christian spirituality in Christian religious extremism and have a validity that those who are not Christian or religious cannot.

In dealing with religious extremism and violence the value of validating what more spiritually oriented members of religions have to say has been overlooked. David Rohde says there is a need for these religious moderates to take the lead in confronting religious extremism in their own religions. I point out that among those that are called moderates are people that have a more developed spiritual concept of religion. I feel it is a spiritual duty to confront the spiritual corruption of the religions that we participate in for if those who have spiritual insight do not confront religious extremism in our own religions, no one else can and continued escalation of violence is inevitable.

The interconnectedness of all things is real. Conflict resolution begins from within. It cannot be forced from an exterior source because there is no outside force that is greater than that which connects us. To deny this connection with each other is therefore a self-destructive act because when we deny our connection with each other we are ultimately denying a part of ourselves. Expanding the awareness of our interconnectedness is the key to dealing with our self-destructive tendencies. Using more moderate spiritual voices to address those of religious extremism within the same religion is an example of how to promote change from within.

Humanity needs to shift its perception of itself and how it relates to the world it lives in on all levels. This tremendous shift requires a change in core beliefs. This shift can best be described as a change from religious to spiritual in the general way that humanity relates, shifting from believing and relating to the world religiously to relating to it spiritually. Religions produce folks that think that the religion that they practice is the best and the only true one. These bi-products of religious belief produce attitudes of the practitioners that they are somehow more special than those not of their religion. Borrowing an idea from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a religious person in the US (for example) could be described as believing that all Americans are equal but that those that practice the same religion as they do are more equal than others. It is a way of spouting equality while acting otherwise. The religious bias of inequality is a main part of the thinking that justifies exploitation, oppression and violence against others. A similar correlation can be explored about the way that attitudes of entitlement and elitism relating to natural resources have to be shifted in order to make human existence on this planet sustainable. (The effects of prejudicial religious attitudes seem so obvious that I am not going into the specifics necessary to make a formal argument. If this is too general please post a question or argument and we can discuss it further.) Thinking that is fundamentally biased in this way makes the future of humanity unsustainable and must be shifted.

There are those that understand this because they have not only had these experiences themselves, but they have an understanding of the what is required to to establish that experience. These people are Spiritual Teachers. Spiritual Teachers are the key ingredient that humanity needs to make the shift from religious to spiritual because they know the reality of spirituality through spiritual experience. One great example of this is the common concept of compassion compared to that concept presented by a Spiritual Teacher. People frequently refer to compassion, but when asked what compassion is specifically the definition becomes very vague. Compare this with what the Buddhist Spiritual Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh (blogs: Danny Fisher, 108ZenBooks, RBO, Enlightened Horsemanship, the loveART blog, Feeling Up In Down Times) teaches: that compassion only comes from understanding. This indicates that both understanding and compassion are specific direct experiences, and it implies that compassion is always a predictable result of increased understanding.

I once met the Spiritual Teacher, the Supreme Patriarch of Buddhism from Cambodia, Maha Ghosananda (blogs: CHANROEUN, Making Peace, Ruby Ramblings, Democratic Peace Blog, Skip Schiel, Church of Skippy) and asked him what Dharma is. He began telling me the textbook definition of the eightfold path. I rudely interrupted him to explain that I understood the general theory but I wanted to know how one knows what is the right thing to do in life when one is actively practicing Dharma. How do we know when to do more and when we are to back off, etc. He genuinely smiled and held up three fingers. He said, “Here, Now, This. When you are here, be only here. When it is now, be only now, and when you do this, do only this.” I said “So if I practice this I will always know what to do?” and he exclaimed, “Precisely! and when I do not I only make mistakes.”

These are all examples of Spiritual Teachers teaching from direct experience, and validating direct experience over religious belief. When the Enlightenment of these individuals and the Sikh Spiritual Teachers that I have mentioned in previous posts, Yogi Bhajan and Sant Guru Dev Singh, is investigated and examined it is found that they all were students of Spiritual Teachers themselves first. There are notions that spirituality can be learned without a Spiritual Teacher, or that it can be learned from a book. The notion that Enlightenment can be achieved without a Spiritual Teacher is simply a way to avoid the reality of what is truly necessary. The intimacy with which we delude ourselves makes Enlightenment without a Spiritual Teacher an impossibility today more than ever. The reason it is more impossible now than in the past to achieve Enlightenment without a Spiritual Teacher is that technology is so available now to divert attention from dealing with harsh truths and cater to our self serving tendencies. This is the role of a Spiritual Teacher, to show the path, to know the requirements, and to confront the cheating along the way. No one learns without this level of involvement with a Spiritual Teacher.

My Spiritual Teacher, Yogi Bhajan (blogs: Kundalini Yoga I Am, Kundalininow’s Blog, Har-Prakash Khalsa, Catalyst Yogi, Spirit Voyage, Sosieji’s Weblog), considered what is referred to as the New Age as the time when the shift from religious to spiritual will occur and that this can only occur through a newfound discovery of the validity of Spiritual Teachers. Yogi Bhajan was very clear that the defining purpose of his life was to create Spiritual Teachers to facilitate that shift. He was also a pragmatist. He established the structure for the second side of the teachings, Sat Nam Rasayan (blogs: Darsana Wellness, Healing with Lea, Be the Lighthouse ). He made sure that this was established in an open way so that students from any Spiritual Teacher can learn to understand the inner teachings of their own lineages. At the same time Yogi Bhajan was also aware that the vast majority of his own students had made their reverence of him paramount and had come to rely on that relationship in such a way that made learning the second side of the teachings virtually impossible. He allowed this to happen deliberately.

It presented itself to do this because while it is necessary to develop the strength of commitment required to have a Spiritual Teacher in order for a student to fully face and resolve their self-centered delusions, the student must also get beyond their Spiritual Teacher and learn to exclusively rely on the Spiritual Teacher that lies within. Yogi Bhajan chose his own students to be examples of how this is not achieved when he allowed them to instigate the IKYTA certification. Allowing this stands as a clear example of how the teachings of a Spiritual Teacher become subverted into a religion by over-relying on the Spiritual Teacher and making the godliness of the Spiritual Teacher and the relationship to that Teacher more significant than the teachings that produce the experience of spirituality. In order for there to be a monumental shift from religious to spiritual there needed to be a very clear example of the pitfall of deifying a Spiritual Teacher which is the basis for all religions. Yogi Bhajan allowed his own students to be that example so that humanity could make a permanent shift from religious to spiritual.

I read about Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion yesterday, along with her becoming outspoken against the traditional definitions for God. I then visited blogs that were discussing these things and decided to make this post as part of that discussion. This contribution to that discussion is from a the perspective of someone that has followed a specific Spiritual Teacher and so the response reflects that association. This does not mean that I presume that my Spiritual Teacher has the market cornered on enlightenment. I do not. In fact I feel that I have identified several Enlightened Masters alive at this time from different lineages, and refer to them as Spiritual Teachers. It is my impression that there is very little respect today for Spiritual Teachers which is a tremendous loss if those teachings have validity. This response is therefore an attempt to expand on the thoughts that Karen Armstrong puts forth from the perspective of the lineages that produce Enlightenment. Any validity in this response comes from the validity of the teachings of those lineages.

We deal with questions that do not have specific answers all the time. Questions like:

Is there God, and if so what is God?

What is compassion?

What is love?

This list could go on and on. Just because there is no specific answer to questions like these does not mean that no answer exists. The difference here is that while there is no answer for these question from any source outside of ourselves, we do have the ability to produce an answer from our own understanding through direct experience. Questions like these cannot be satisfactorily answered by sources outside of ourselves because the answers that we seek are experiential. No book or explanation can convey an experience such as what it is like to become a parent, or ride a bicycle. The experience is the only way to these understandings, and even then each individual’s experience will be unique. Karen Armstrong’s argument that a finite mind cannot ever conceive infinity and therefore God is correct, but this does not mean that we have no experience of infinity or God. It means that our understanding of that experience will always be less than the full understanding.

This is the reason that Spiritual Teachers have always relied on spiritual practices to teach students. The words of the Teacher are not enough to convey the understanding that is necessary for the students to achieve enlightenment, there must also be the personal experience that is acquired through the spiritual practice. This is still not the full answer however, if it were all students that performing spiritual practices would become enlightened. Simply performing spiritual practices is also not enough. There is more. In order to understand what is needed from the spiritual practice honesty is required. Deepening spiritual understanding requires a deepening of our honesty. This is reflected when we meet a Spiritual Teacher. What we understand when we meet the Spiritual Teacher is that they have developed much deeper honesty with themselves. If we recognize that honesty we recognize the person as a Spiritual Teacher.

How to develop this internal honesty through spiritual practice has been called the second side of the teachings, and has traditionally only been taught in the silence. The rigidity of this tradition has had the effect that the vast majority of students of any Spiritual Teacher do not learn the second side of the teachings. The result is that these students that do not learn for themselves and become dependent upon relying on spiritual practices and their relationship to the Spiritual Teacher. When this occurs we notice that something essential is missing in religious practices and rituals, and that reliance on the divinity of the founder of the religion is stressed more than the pursuit of an ever deepening spiritual understanding, and way of relating to others. This has become an ever worsening problem as belief systems that run contrary to the original teachings have been constructed based on limited understanding of the original teachings and used to justify subjugating others, genocide, and even justify the extermination of humankind.

In order to teach this second side of the teachings openly so that a greater number of students can develop a structure had to be developed. One Spiritual Teacher to dedicate his life to doing so was Yogi Bhajan. His structure for learning the second side of the teachings was given the name Sat Nam Rasayan. which means healing through the true identity. The appropriateness of this name is apparent in the healing that is experienced whenever the internal honesty is further developed in some meaningful way.

The second side of the teachings, the structure of Sat Nam Rasayan, is built on very simple experiences that we all have of being honest with ourselves. The significance is that this means that all spiritual development is built on this. The first of these experiential awarenesses is that all we know is what we feel.

When I first started learning Sat Nam Rasayan this seemed to me to be too simplistic to have much significance, but it proved important on at least two levels. First because I was critically assessing what was being taught, I was intent on finding something to argue with, and the assertion that all I knew was simply a result of what I felt passed my critical assessment. Secondly in order to learn to re-evaluate my perceptions there needed to be a way to establish a shift in normal perception in order to make learning possible.

The assertion that all we know is what we feel may seem overly simplistic but it conveys that we can always identify what we feel if we are honest enough, and that everything that we think of as our understanding is ultimately experiential. On the other hand, consider that we have feelings (many of which that we may not understand but do have none the less) about everything. There is no thought or idea or concept that can be presented to us that we do not have a feeling response to. This does not imply that the way that we interpret our feelings is correct. On the contrary, we normally delude ourselves into believing that what we feel we want is most important. The process of how we untangle our self-delusion about what we feel requires us to develop deeper personal honesty and is the structure of the second side of the teachings, Sat Nam Rasayan.

Spiritual problems can only be resolved with spiritual solutions. An example of this is that the recent global financial meltdown had spiritual problems like exploitation and greed as the root cause on both sides of the equation, both borrowers and lenders. Without those spiritual issues being addressed, individuals taking responsibility for their own contribution to the mess, and resolving to make amends there is no resolution possible and the suffering intensifies in order for the underlying spiritual issues to be dealt with. It is my opinion that the tendency to ignore spiritual problems is at the root of the most serious challenges that threaten the survival of mankind. These include global climate change, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and terrorism in the name of religion, and a capitalist model for economics that is so exploitive that it is ultimately unsustainable.

I feel that these problems are bigger than any that have ever challenged humanity in recorded history simply because of the sheer numbers of people that contribute to these problems is so much larger than any time in history that to change things requires changing the thinking of that many more people. Considering these things has led me to the conclusion that the only way to get so many people to change themselves and the way that they relate to the planet and each other is by humanity as a whole becoming more spiritual in its approach to life. The only way that this is feasible is for true Spiritual Teachers to become prominent throughout the entire world. This blog is therefore an exploration of what that means and how it can be achieved.

I welcome all comments from those that wish to engage in this discussion. I will however delete any and all comments that engage in name calling.